The chef Marco Pierre White is suing his ex-wife's lawyers, Withers LLP, after the court of appeal ruled that they may have a case to answer when they acted for Mrs White, who is alleged to have looked at Mr White's correspondence during her divorce.

Divorce is usually messy, and the fights over who gets what are too often made worse by the deliberate complication of financial affairs, the trousering of money, the exaggerated forecasts in cost of living, and the seeming total financial meltdown of self-employed people in the months leading up to the hearing. Most typically, the acts of subterfuge are carried out by the main income earner, which has historically made life hard for divorcing wives. Anecdotes abound of ex-spouses having their post stolen and being investigated by private detectives, or of financial institutions being contacted while husband and wife are still together. If the parties become uncooperative, researching to find buried treasure, fecund pensions and the real bottom line can eat up the combined assets during a divorce.

In the White case the appeal court is treading on ground that will send shivers down the spines of divorce lawyers around the country – not necessarily bad news, you might think, but in a time of great emotional distress and uncertainty a lawyer can become your best navigator. Casting the net of suspicion over the lawyers who represent those going through divorce will seriously alter the playing field, and may make it easier for spouses to get away with deception. If a man and woman have been husband and wife for many years, and wife during this time has siphoned money off her business into a private account unknown to the husband, come the divorce it may be equally wrong not to disclose the account as it might be for the husband to return to the matrimonial home and swipe a bundle of mail that discloses it, but one has far more serious consequences for the ongoing positions of the parties, and the fairness of the outcome of their divorce.

In his judgment allowing White to go after Withers, Lord Justice Ward considered the case of Monsanto v Tilly & others from 2000. In that case an environmental group which threatened to enter land to uproot genetically modified crops could not rely upon the defence of public interest to justify trespass. That scenario is strikingly different from taking correspondence from a spouse during divorce proceedings, where the public interest is in ensuring a fair hearing of all relevant facts. The nature of the relationship between the two parties and the type of court case make this quite different from commercial or public spheres of action.

Ward said that search and seizure warrants should be used to obtain documents. It's a costly fiction to suggest that the best remedy to the very human impulse to hoard comes in the form of orders for disclosure, and seizure warrants. People who hide bank accounts from husbands or wives may be slow to disclose them. These solutions would draw out litigation and result in yet more of the assets on the table going to the lawyers.

It may be unsavoury to have husbands and wives digging around the bottoms of drawers, and to a certain extent wrong, but the greater harm is in a system that prevents lawyers acting for people who take these documents. The law must deal with the reality it faces. We should allow for the reasonable inspection of documents during divorce, and shield lawyers with a public interest defence from the unfairness of holding them responsible for the acts of those whose motive is to discover the truth.